Tuesday, August 09, 2011

News at Eleven: You can also see poems taking shape

under your eyes. We can feel relief that "This Be the Verse" didn't use the word "foist", which he was contemplating (as in "they foist on you the faults they had"--it would have knocked half the stuffing out of the poem); and the last line of "An Arundel Tomb" went through several incarnations before finding its final, unimprovably ambiguous shape: "That what survives of us is love . . . All that survives of us is love . . ."

from The Guardian: Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin--review

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